It appears that today is officially the day when Nvidia gave a green light to its partners to rebrand entry-level GPUs. We already wrote about this back when Nvidia silently rebranded some of its OEM-only cards, but as of today GT 610, GT 620 and GT 630 are going to hit retail/e-tail with shiny new boxes.

According to our info and actual specs listed at Nvidia's website, the cheapest GT 610 is actually a rebranded GT 520 GPU based on the GF119 GPU with 49 CUDA cores. The clocks have been tweaked a bit and now the GPU is clocked at 810MHz. It will feature 1GB of DDR3 memory clocked at 1.8GHz and paired up with a 64-bit memory interface.

Next in line are the GT 620 and GT 630, both based on quite well known GF108 GPU with 96 CUDA cores. These cards are simply GT 430 and GT 440 thrown into a shiny new box. It will of course depend on what kind of SKU did partners went with back when they launched GT 430/440 graphics cards but it is pretty much the same GF108 GPU that can be paired up with either DDR3 or GDDR5 memory, depending on the SKU.

Some partners will go with the GT 620 graphics card that will work at 700MHz for the GPU and 1400MHz for 1GB of DDR3 memory paired up with a 128-bit memory interface. The GT 630 will be pretty much the same except for higher 810MHz GPU clock and higher 1600MHz memory clock for the same 1GB of DDR3 memory.

As noted earlier, the rebranding does not come as a surprise considering that the entry-level GPU market is simply obsolete due to quite decent figures from latest integrated graphics solutions and AMD's own APUs.

Some of the rebranded and reboxed graphics cards have already been listed across the Europe and you can expect prices similar to those seen with GT 520, GT 430 and GT 440, or around €40 to €60. You can check out Nvidia product page here.

The GT 520 1GB SilentFX can be found at about €38 and is passively cooled, which indeed is a big plus if you ask HTPC users. The card has three video connectors, one VGA, one HDMI and one dual-link DVI.

Geforce GT 520 boasts a 29W TDP and DirectX 11 support but it only has 48 CUDA processors (shaders). The GT 520 1GB SilentFX is based on the GF119, which is regarded as the most basic Fermi-based GPU.

The GT 520 1GB SilentFX’ GPU ticks at 810MHz, which is the reference clock. However, the memory stands at 535MHz (1070Hz effectively), rather than the reference 900MHz.

The packaging says that the card is part of Gainward’s GOOD series, meaning that Gainward designed its own cooling. In this case, the cooling is passive and dual slot.

The box holds a short user’s manual, driver CD and the card.

The cooler is made of a single aluminum block and should do a pretty good job. In fact, the cooling should do well in smaller cases too, if the dual slot width does not prevent you from using it.

The Geforce GT 520’s gaming performance is pretty low, which is to be expected. 3D Mark 2011 shows that Geforce GT 430 is better for occasional gaming but it also consumes more (Max. TDP 49W). Note that Geforce GT 430 cards are based on the GF108, which boasts double the specs of the GF119. Geforce GT 520 will do fine in hardware acceleration of HD video, but we’ll know more on that as soon as we're done testing.

Gaming is possible but only with minimum detail settings.

We measured a maximum of 69°C after lengthy gaming, which is pretty good considering that we tested it in a semi-open PC case with not much airflow. We’ll also repeat our testing in smaller HTPC cases so stay tuned.